8.26am: (all times GMT) Welcome to Middle East Live. The Arab League's monitoring mission to Syria is coming under increasing pressure: the UN says killings have increased since the arrival of monitors; protesters have been repeatedly shot during observer visits, monitors themselves have been attacked; and a observer has resigned claiming the mission is a farce.

Assad manages to blame a foreign conspiracy that's so vast with regard to the situation in Syria that it now includes the Arab League, most of the Syrian opposition, the entire international community. He throws responsibility on everybody but back on himself.

Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, a chemistry expert and a director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in central Iran, was killed after two assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

Authorities have intercepted a cargo of ammunition bound for Syria for checks, reports said today. A vessel carrying the cargo stopped for refuelling at the port of Limassol where the cargo was intercepted, Politis newspaper reported.

The ship was carrying 60 tonnes of ammunition and had been sailing to the port of Latakia in Syria from St Petersburg in Russia, the newspaper said.

"The mission was a farce and the observers have been fooled. What I saw is a humanitarian disaster," he told the broadcaster. Malek said he saw snipers on the roofs of building under the command of army officers, and claimed the security forces attacked areas as soon as monitors left.

9.42am: Horrific accounts and videos have emerged of Tuesday's violence in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor during an Arab League monitoring visit to the city.

Passing this law would be an affront to thousands of victims of Saleh's repressive rule, including the relatives of peaceful protesters shot dead last year. Yemeni authorities should be locking up those responsible for serious crimes, not rewarding them with a license to kill.

10.52am: The Swedish football team is due to play Bahrain in an international friendly on January 18. On Twitter, Maryam Alkhawaja of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights has urged the Swedes to watch this video first.

requesting the #Swedish Football team to see this film before plying with #Bahrain- please respect Human Rights

The regime sends spies to take pictures of the protesters who dare speak to the observers. Before every excursion, the streets are secured in any way necessary, by bullets or arrests (for the safety of the observers or to preserve what's left of the regime's tarnished image?). The streets of Deraa have to be scrubbed clean of its people, silencing their voices and erasing any sign of dissent, to present an image of control, safely guarded by snipers lurking on rooftops.

Since the observers' arrival, the revolution's landscape has changed, writes Hanano.

The regime added tear gas, water cannons, and nail bombs to its arsenal of mass arrests, torture, live ammunition, and sniper fire used to attack protesters. Last Friday, Jan. 7, the people of Damascus awoke to news of an explosion in the Midan, the heart of the city.

And on the ground, Syrians have become rapidly disillusioned with the monitors' ability to do their work. Hanano quotes an unnamed activist in Daraa as telling him:

When the observers first arrived, the people were extremely optimistic. On the first day the team met with the mayor, so we couldn't do anything. The second day, we invited them to a protest at a martyr's funeral. They said, 'We don't have cars for transportation.' We asked, 'How could the team of observers not have cars?' So we postponed the protest.

The third day, we asked them to come and observe the protest, but the regime took them somewhere else. Their work is not even at 1 percent. Nothing is happening. They aren't gathering testimonies from the families. They are witnessing the snipers and the army on the streets. They see this with their own eyes. A stranger walking in the streets would know.

11.12am: Our colleague Ian Cobain is looking for help in trying to contact the family and friends of Tariq Sabri Mahmud al-Fahdaw, born in Baghdad in around 1966, who disappeared after being detained, along with about 60 other men, by coalition forces at a roadblock west of Ramadi on 11 April 2003.

If you have any information please contact Ian via Twitter: @IanCobain

11.17am: The Iranian nuclear scientist killed in an explosion this morning had been planning to attend a memorial ceremony later today for a physics professor who was also killed in a blast two years ago, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency.

Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a senior professor at Tehran University, died on January 12 2010 when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded near his car as he was about to leave for work.

Roshan, 32, was inside the Iranian-assembled Peugeot 405 car together with two others when the bomb exploded near Gol Nabi Street in north Tehran, Fars reported. It said the person accompanying Roshan died later of injuries at a hospital.

Fars described the explosion as a "terrorist attack" targeting Roshan, a graduate of the prestigious Sharif University of Technology in Tehran.

Roshan was a chemistry expert who was involved in building polymeric layers for gas separation, which is the use of various membranes to isolate gases.

11.32am: China's premier will be discussing the Arab Spring with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar during a visit to the region next week, AP reports.

Assad told the crowd: "Syria is facing a conspiracy but we will beat it; I've never felt weak."

"Conspiracy is in its final phase; we should be ready when the country calls for us," the Syrian presdient said.

Here's a video of his appearance.

@stephenstarr, a freelance journalist, has tweeted that Assad was accompanied by his wife, Asma al-Assad.

Appearance of First Lady and children at #Damascusrally to quell reports she had fled #Syria #Damascus #Assad

Although the picture is grainy, you can just about make out Asma al-Assad standing on the ground with her children at about 4.05 minutes in.

11.53am: Assad told his supporters he wants to "draw strength" from them, according an initial take by AP.

President Bashar Assad joined thousands of his supporters Wednesday in an extremely rare public appearance at a rally in the capital Damascus, telling the crowd he wanted to draw strength from them.

Assad, 46, was surrounded by security guards when he appeared in the crowd, dressed more casually than usual in a jacket but no tie.

"I wanted to be with you so I can draw strength from you in the face of everything that Syria is subjected to," he said. "It was important that we maintain our faith in the future. I have that faith in the future and we will undoubtedly triumph over this conspiracy," he said.

12.14pm: Ian Black has been given a one-sided view of the city of Homs on a government-organised trip to the centre of Syrian uprising.

The atmosphere remains very, very controlling. What's true for the Arab League monitors is even more true for journalists. If you are in Syria as a journalist with a visa then you are pretty closely subject to government control. This trip today is an interesting example of that.

This is a government-organised trip to show the government's side of the story and they are doing that very energetically. They have brought us to the part of Homs which is controlled by the Syrian government. From here you can see virtually nothing of what's going on in the areas controlled by what people call gunmen.

A few minutes before the call Ian could hear shooting from an area said to be controlled by gunmen. Government minders want to keep parts of the city "out of the picture because it doesn't fit the official government narrative," Ian said.

A wounded soldier in a hospital in Homs told Ian that protests were initially peaceful but then turned violent. Ian said he did not get a chance to verify the claim.

You can't get to see what's happening on the other side of the city where many people don't even have the benefit of hospitals or medical care. It is interesting to see quite how fiercely the Syrian government is defending its position in the city and how much apparent loyalty it can command here.

There is a significant armed presence even in areas of the city away from the front line, he said.

In the commercial centre whole streets of shops are shut down. It doesn't look like a city that is leading a normal life at all, even on the side that is completely under government control. There are soldiers in full combat gear in the middle of the city. It has got a strange feeling to it.

Ian added:

The people you talk to here are all singing very much from the same sheet. They all talk about terrorism, murderers and treachery, and particularly they complain about the support of western governments for these enemies of the Syrian regime. There is a sense that they are all saying the same thing from the same script. A man just insisted to me that there was only a security solution to this crisis, no political solution.

We are only hearing one side of the story, but it is important to say there is real strength of feeling, [and] apparently, at least, pretty unanimous support for the government.

On the future of the Arab League mission, Ian said:

It was clear from the start that this was pretty much mission impossible. But there is a strong pressure for the Arab League mission to be maintained. If it is withdrawn there is no international presence or pressure point at all on the Syrian regime.

12.51pm: Here's a summary of the latest developments.

Syria

•Bashar al-Assad has made a surprise appearance at a rally of his supporters in Damascus, along with his wife and children. The rare public outing, which comes just a day after he vowed to quash the "terrorist" opposition with an "iron first", offered the president a chance to rail again against the "conspiracy" facing Syria. (See 11.44am.)

•A small group of foreign journalists has been taken on a tightly-restricted government tour of Homs. The Guardian's Ian Black said his minders were "energetically" showing them "the government's side of the story" and that it was very unlikely the journalists would be taken to Baba Amr or any other restive neighbourhood. From what he had seen so far, he said, there was "apparently, at least, pretty unanimous support for the government." (See 12.14pm.)

•400 people been have killed in Syria since the Arab League monitors arrived in an escalation of the crackdown against protesters, said a senior UN official. The figures, revealed in a closed session of the security council, were seized on by the US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who chided Syria's ally Russia for its failure to produce a promise draft resolution on the crisis. Horrific violence emerged last night and this morning of events in Deir Ezzor yesterday, where the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights said 15 people were killed- see 9.42am.

•Arab League observer Anwar Malek resigned from the mission, saying the work was farcical and was failing to denounce a "humanitarian disaster". He told al-Jazeera that Syria was failing to implement any of the League's proposals and engaging in fabrication and deception. (See 9.15am.)

1.04pm: A Moroccan rapper who has become one of the monarchy's boldest critics is today awaiting a verdict in his trial for assault charges which his lawyers and right activists said were a ploy to muzzle the popular singer.

A French journalist from FRANCE 2 TV was killed in #Homs and his colleague wounded #Syria

2.57pm: On his way back to Damascus from Homs, Ian Black has given this account of the attack which, he has been told, left one journalist and eight Syrians dead, and another journalist injured.

As we were leaving a march was beginning, a march in solidarity with the Syrian regime- the sort of thing that happens quite a lot particularly when foreign journalists and especially television cameras are there.

There was a second group of journalists travelling separately from our group and who we've been told were filming the march as it was setting off when we think a vehicle in which they were travelling was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

We don't have any further details. But what this does appear to be is the first time that a foreign journalist has been killed in the violence accompanying the uprising in Syria.

They've told us what happened- it certainly appears to fit in with their view of how things are on the ground: the Syrian state on the one side and armed terrorists on the other.

But as I say this is the first time I think that a foreign journalist has been killed and, in the way of the world, that's likely to have quite a wide resonance.

Of course Syrians are being killed every day; eight others we're told have been killed in this incident. It's part of the ongoing violence in what seems to me, after a few days now in Syria, to be a conflict that is getting worse all the time, not showing any signs of stabilising - quite the opposite. So this will be another detail in that grim, still unfolding story.

3.34pm: The French journalist killed in Homs was Gilles Jacquier, a well-known reporter for the France 2 television channel.

Homs attack that killed French journalist first described as involving mortars then changed to rocket-propelled grenade. Circs v unclear

4.25pm: Envoyé Spécial, the programme Jaquier worked for, has posted this video in tribute to him.

Entirely in French, it was taken in 2009 when he won a Jean-Louis Calderon prize for a piece on girls going to school in Afghanistan. Jacquier is filmed explaining how he did the report. The narrator says:

[Jacquier] is an habitué of conflict. He has covered the best-known, like Kosovo and Algeria, but also...those which go on but of which noone speaks.

His prize-winning report from Kandahar is hailed by the chief judge as "un reportage de vérité"- a work of truth.

In this recently-filed report, Luke writes that the MV Chariot, which set off from St Petersburg in early December, was forced to pull into the Greek Cypriot port of Limassol because of stormy seas. It had been on its way to Turkey and Syria, inspectors said.

Customs officials who boarded the ship discovered four containers. They were unable to open them but concluded that they contained a "dangerous cargo". State radio in Cyprus went further, alleging that the Chariot was carrying "tens of tonnes of munitions".

Russia is one of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's few remaining international allies. Moscow resents what it regards as western encroachment on its traditional sphere of influence and has continued to supply Damascus with advanced weapons and other arms, to the annoyance of Washington.